Skyrim and the Call of Adventure

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

For some the mere mention of the name may conjure up images of snow capped mountains, ancient ruins and dragons. Sneaking through dark and damp caves with your trusty bow or running through the Riften forests colored in autumn leaves. Or maybe a slow walk through the streets of various Holds at night while Jeremy Soul's beautiful soothing melodies play.
Yet for others it may remind them of the numerous frustrating and hilarious bugs that plague the game. The shallow combat system that felt dated even by 2011's standards. The lack of well written quest chains or how little your actions affected the world. To some Skyrim may even feel like an insult to the RPG genre.

For a long time I struggled to come to terms with the dichotomy in experience since at different times I agreed with either side of the argument. It was never as simple as the game just having some really good aspects mixed in with bad design elements cause when examined carefully almost every aspect fell short of the industry standard in their respective field.
The 1st two entries in the Elder Scrolls franchise were helmed by Julian LeFay and they were procedurally generated worlds which acted acted a fantasy simulator for whatever skeleton plot the games had. They were supremely ambitious for their time and even now Daggerfall has its own cult following for giving an experience few other can provide. But when Todd Howard became the creative director, he moved away from a huge procedural generated world for a much smaller scale but handcrafted world in Morrowind.The wondrously alien world and a focused approach to unique story quests drew in many to this series.

But ironically with each successive entries in the Elder Scroll-Fallout series, this focus on stories and complexity of the world slowly started being stripped away for more open ended and shallow quests. Many have accused this change and simplification on Bethesda being too lazy and appealing to the lowest common denominator of the consumer. While I can't verify the truthfulness of this observation, I believe the problem is not as simple as that. Skyrim is the truest example of a jack of all trades but surprisingly when all the varying elements come together they coalesce into an experience that far eclipses the sum of its parts. So let's dig into how these aspects work together.

World Design and systems that tie it together:

Despite the departure in styles, Bethesda's signature design principle of "Be who you want, do what you want" never changed. Each entry has focused on one aspect of the game world while iterating and evolving what came before. ES 3: Morrowind was the 1st to have handcrafted locations so they focused on making it feel as unique as possible. Exploration and getting lost in the world was the primary goal and thus npcs took a back seat. While there were numerous interesting NPCs, most acted more as information vendors than being a believable humans.
ES 4: Oblivion was the first to implement radiant AI which became the focus to make the world as believable as possible. While these systems taken for granted now, watching NPCs go about their daily and weekly routine, interact with each other independent of the player was a sight to behold in 2006. But this technology was also in its infancy back then so over time these stilted npc interactions became a joke. Oblivion also introduced quest markers and fast travel to reduce the frustration of exploration. While a case definitely be made for this change, there's also something to be said about the loss of wonder that comes from a guided approach.

Now we come to Skyrim where the elements of both the previous games were combined in a way that all aspects work together well. Most NPCs you meet were given specific personality or character traits to reduce the awkwardness felt in the previous games. Varying terrain types flowed more smoothly into one another. For e.g. in Oblivion a snow covered land might transition into a grassy plain within a few meters, in Skyrim this transition occurs more naturally. Care was also taken to have more variety to the environments, much more than previous 2 entries. A design style that Bethesda likes to call "epic reality" was used in crafting the environments. In layman's terms what this means is they make environments that look realistic but design it in a way that from almost every location there's an interesting if not breathtaking vista to gaze upon. The best parts of nature crammed into a small space so that the player is never lacking in places they want to visit. This did come at cost of some lore inaccuracies, like Whiterun not looking cold enough but arguably it was worth it to enhance the player experience.

"We give the player a lot of credit, we trust him. We give him all these

tools and we teach him this stuff and he’s an excellent player-director.

He wants downtime, he goes to town and talks to people. 

Says he wants some challenge – ‘I’m gonna fight that dragon I heard about’.

It becomes much harder to put the game down. He is the director of his experience." 

                                                                                                       - Todd Howard, 2012 DICE Skyrim Keynote

This design philosophy permeates in every aspect of the game that the player has control over. But at the same time the game sets up paths for players that want a guided approach. Right from the beginning when the players come out of the cave, you're given the option to carve out your own path or follow the temporary companion to the first village. All the various elements of the world work together to present the player with a fantasy simulation and its the player's job to figure out how to tackle each region. No matter which direction you explore, you are bound to find secrets to discover or caves to plunder. Now this game design wouldn't work if the game didn't make exploration rewarding. The gameplay incentives works in 3 folds:

• Extrinsic material reward of interesting and often quest specific loot.
• Constant increase in stats that occurs naturally through repeat use of weapon.
• Intrinsic reward of getting to see unique and often awe inspiring location and the secrets they hold.

Quest in Skyrim are simply a skeleton structure through which the player creates their own adventure.
A rather controversial design choice that I feel helps Skyrim is how enemies are leveled with respect to the player. Enemies always pose a relatively comparable level of threat no matter which direction one chooses to explore and its the stats of the equipment one uses or higher tier spells that determine how effective they would be in combat. The reason why I think it works better than a world with static level or only upward scaling enemies is that in Skyrim you can explore in any direction from the beginning and expect a roughly similar level of challenge. Whereas in other games, you are soft locked into exploring a specific few locations intended by developers, something which can get tiresome in subsequent playthroughs. This freedom ties into what makes Skyrim a RPG despite the distinct lack of choice in quests which I will elaborate further on. It's not a perfect system however and leaves a lot of room for improvement, specially since gameplay is independent of player skill. 

If I had to name 1 major complaint I have about exploration, it would be quest marker and fast travel still exists. It was slightly changed  from Oblivion so that you couldn't fast travel to places you haven't been before, but changes are not significant enough. This area needs the biggest tweak in future titles since it undermines the exploration and immersive aspect of the games. A good could compromise could be a more robust transport system, something which serves little to no purpose in Skyrim in its current state.  

Player Freedom and Gameplay : 

The genre that most people associate with Elder Scrolls games over anything else is RPG. The meaning of "role playing" has been more and more diluted over the years as having specific elements like skill tree is seen as enough of a reason to call a game a RPG. Skyrim fortunately is not that type of game. However when closely examined it is also undeniable that RPG systems that the game implements are rather shallow. Features like choice of a class bonus at the beginning, spell creation had been removed. Your choice of race barely affects your experience of the game, there aren't many role play choices to make during quests and your actions rarely leave any perceivable impact on the world even when narratively they are huge. 

Considering all these drawbacks it can be easy to say Skyrim is a bad RPG and while there's a certainly a case to be made there, playing the game it's hard to deny that it exudes a strong RPG freedom that few others can provide. There's 2 core pillars why I think that is the case 

• Intuitiveness
• Immersion

Tamriel, the continent that Skyrim exists in is a very Tolkien or Dungeon & Dragons inspired setting, a setting that has penetrated the mainstream pop culture and has been ingrained in our subconscious. What this means for the game is the game doesn't have to explain its fantasy races and concepts too much. Even from the start of the game your given selection of race choices is very intuitive. You can play anything from a tribal Orc to Khaljit thief, all lovingly rendered in 3D models which looks like big step up from Bethesda's previous titles. And this variety in choice is what plants the seed of roleplaying in your subconscious even before you start the game.
Like I discussed in the previous section, the game doesn't do much hand holding in what you're meant to be doing but rather puts a group of gameplay systems that entices the player no matter what they choose to peruse. A design principle Todd Howard, the creative director of the game mentioned using is a core loop:

Learn → Play → Challenge → Surprise 

In this loop the "learning" portion of the game is made to be as simple and intuitive as possible. While this has a major disadvantage of the game being too shallow, it does partly remove the abstraction of gameplay systems that is always a hurdle in the road to immersion in a game world. The focus is thus put on "play" and "challenge" where the task is put on the player to experiment with what little the game teaches them and slowly ramp up the challenge when they feel comfortable. Just when the player gets complacent with the challenge, the games throws a surprise in the form of unique more powerful version of the enemy, putting the player on the learning stage again. 

This intuitiveness directly facilitates player immersion. The less time you spend thinking about stats, the more time you spend in the game world planning your story whether consciously or unconsciously. A good example is the standing stones. In previous games you chose your class specific advantages at the beginning through a menu but Skyrim reworks them into an in-game stone that grant any of 3 playstyle experience buffs and more specific buffs are left for the player to discover further on, increasing the immersive aspect of exploration.

Skyrim at its core is a static fantasy simulation over anything else. The world doesn't change on larger scale no matter what the player does, bandit camps refill over time, choosing a side in war change naught but the color of guard armor and even killing Alduin or Emperor of Cyrodil has no perceivable change. But what this means is the player has a rough idea of how quests are going to go down and thus conjure up their own story through the actions of their character. The vaguer the details of the plot is, the more freedom the player's imagination has.
You can imagine your character to be an Nordic evil assassin that takes part in Dark Brotherhood and goes on murder rampages. Then maybe he find a wife, adopts an orphan and decides to turn his life around to fight for his home country. Or maybe your character starts as good guy, fighting for The Companions but then gets an unfortunate taste of vampirism and turns into a power hungry creature of the night. The point being, when quests are vague and world is static, it creates an unique sandbox for the player to roleplay as their desired character. You could say a static world helps in a dynamic player story.

All this freedom does come at the cost of quest urgency or world reactivity and it can be argued that it is too huge a price to pay. But I feel it is so by design and less because Bethesda is lazy. 

The 5th entry into the Elder Scrolls franchise is far from a perfect execution of its ideas, removing features that even its predecessors had but this gloriously handcrafted fantasy sandbox is a testament to great game design that beckons the player into an otherworldly adventure. It is undeniable that Skryim has had an enduring legacy and will go down in history as one shining example of unique role playing experience that few could match. Here's hoping Bethesda can build upon the success of Skyrim and create an even richer adventure in their upcoming entry into this franchise.